Toll Road Putting Change In Faster Lane

December 24, 1992|By David Ibata.

Rick Hootman`s work boots go ``squoosh`` on the soft muddy slope as the soil research specialist climbs a berm along the southern perimeter of the Morton Arboretum.

The earthwork, which snakes like an ancient Indian serpent mound, is a magnificent structure, a Great Wall of Lisle. It is almost two miles long and up to 30 feet tall, snuggled in a blanket of ryegrass and lightly frosted by a recent snowfall.

And it`s a failure.

``Apparently the berm is not working,`` Hootman says.

The mound was built more than a year ago to shield the arboretum from salt kicked up from traffic on the North-South Tollway and the East-West Tollway. Clusters of young, salt-sensitive white pines were planted atop the berm and at intervals behind it to test its effectiveness.

There are no white pines on the berm today. Just a rutted path that Hootman stands on as he surveys the scene: Gently rolling lawns and groves of the arboretum on one side of the mound, and 16 lanes of tollway on the other. The berm is one of many legacies of the North-South Tollway (Interstate Highway 355), which was built at a cost of roughly $500 million and stretching from Army Trail Road in Addison to Interstate Highway 55 in Bolingbrook. The tollway officially opened three years ago this Saturday.

With controversial proposals pending to build a Fox Valley Freeway and a Lake County leg of the Illinois Highway 53 expressway-and with the state studying a southward extension of I-355 to give the western suburbs access to the proposed third airport in Peotone-it`s a good time to consider what the North-South Tollway has wrought since it opened the day after Christmas 1989. Were the negatives, like salt damage at the arboretum, worth the positives of reduced congestion, new job opportunities and expanded markets for area merchants?

The jury`s still out at the arboretum, where the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority donated $2.5 million to create an Urban Vegetation Laboratory to study the impact of road chemicals on plants.

By the end of the North-South`s first winter, Hootman said, ``the trees on top of and just behind the berm were 80 to 100 percent killed. The damage

(to test trees) decreased as you went back, but even at 900 to 1,200 feet we had 10 to 20 percent damage, and that was a surprise.``

The arboretum may try planting salt-resistant trees and shrubs on the berm to block the salt spray, Hootman said.

Beyond the berm, there`s no question that the North-South Tollway changed the face of suburbia. More importantly, it has changed the way people think about the geography of the suburbs, drawing Joliet and the northwest suburbs closer together by cutting travel times. And that has changed the way people drive and has begun to change the way they live.

Once the ribbon was cut to open the 17 1/2-mile tollway, Du Page County communities that had been virtually inaccessible to northwest Cook County and western Will County were now only a half-hour to 45 minutes away.

In the span of a few months, traffic volumes jumped to levels that stunned tollway officials, levels that had not been expected for years. And local streets that had been clogged for years suddenly opened up.

Tollway traffic volume between Roosevelt Road and North Avenue rocketed from 63,000 vehicles a day in 1990 to 72,000 in 1991 and an estimated 81,000 this year.

This year`s toll revenue for the North-South Tollway amounted to $29 million at the end of October, 13 percent ahead of 1991 and far above the 3 percent revenue growth for all 273 miles of the Illinois tollway system.

Wait a minute. Has this tollway forgotten about the recession?

Robert Hickman, executive director of the tollway authority, attributes the growth to several factors, chief among them construction on the parallel Tri-State Tollway that has chased people over to the North-South.

``Fewer people are traveling on local roads and are taking the tollway instead,`` Hickman said. ``And you`re still getting growth as companies expand and move out here.``

``If you`re a suburbanite, you understand the need to travel,`` said Gail Ryan, a Romeoville resident who is an office administrator in human resources at Ameritech Services in Hoffman Estates.

``With the highways being what they are now, the access isn`t that difficult to a good job with good benefits that will pay me appropriately-the kind of job you won`t find in Joliet,`` Ryan said.

How about Romeoville? She laughs: ``Certainly not!``

Other see the North-South Tollway as a North Michigan Avenue of the western suburbs.

``The ease of being close to the North-South Tollway really broadens the trade area of our shopping center,`` said William Rot, manager of the J.C. Penney store in Yorktown Shopping Center, Lombard, and president of the Yorktown Merchants Association.

Jim Romano, operations manager at Yorktown, said the center at Butterfield Road and Highland Avenue draws from a trade area of 1.2 million people, compared with 500,000 before the North-South opened.